Wednesday 29 January 2020

James Dunnigan : part four

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

I have to admit, few poets have. There are many novelists: Balzac, Faulkner, Sebald, Tolstoy. I think a poet is better served reading other kinds of writing, novels, nonfiction, encyclopedia etc, and viewing other media, painting, film, sculpture, installations, so on so forth. This is finding what poetry can do by understanding first what other art forms can do; finding your way to the edges of poetry from the outside rather than the opposite. This I think is what Anne Carson does and what makes her work so boundlessly appealing to so many people. From Eros the Bittersweet onward, she often sources the form and tone of her work outside of what is generally thought to be ‘poetic’, even when she draws it from philology which while it studies ancient poetry is hardly a ‘poetic’ business. In a world where many people think of a poem as a kind of little clockwork machine, the pleasure of which is in figuring out the mechanism, formal, ideological or otherwise, she has not only electrified and digitized the machine, but, in fact, seems to be getting rid of the machine altogether in favour of the raw current or electrical signal.

Otherwise as was the case with Dr. Carson I think the most important poetic encounter of my life so far has been with the ancients: in my case not with the Greeks but with one particular Roman poet, Virgil, whose Aeneid single-handedly convinced me to start studying Latin, woefully belatedly, in my undergrad years. Virgil’s epic is an electrifying treatise on the concept of ideology in the Althusserian sense, operatic, tragic, brutal as iron and told in lines as heavy and ductile as gold. It also saved my life.


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